How to type pinyin text with tone marks in Windows?

"The U.S. international keyboard that comes with Windows makes typing some accents easy, but apparently not macrons (the bar over the ""u"" in ""chū""). The Māori keyboard has support for those; maybe you can hot switch between the two? Someone claimed to have made a derivative of the international keyboard that permits typing the macrons as well as other accents easily, but I haven't tried it out.

You could try using a tone converter that takes in numeric-based tones and spits out accent-based tones.

Edit:

I found an explicitly pinyin keyboard layout that should do what you want."

You can use the Keyboard Layout Creator to create such a keyboard layout yourself. Off the top of my head I don't know a layout which enables you to type all the tones. As Bkkbrad mentioned, you can't type a macron on US International (which is what I'm using here). But modifying US International to add another dead key for macron shouldn't be too hard.

"I like the online converter at http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/webime2_pinyin.php

Just type e.g. hao3 and it directly becomes hǎo."

I like the pinyinput input method editor. Just type the letters for the syllable followed by a tone number, and it will combine them in the usual way.

"this is old, but anyway, you could use the us international keyboard, in which you can type:
á à ã â

They're not the exact pinyin tone marks but resemble them very closely"